"Experience has, unhappily, demonstrated that the possession of education is not incompatible with the commission of crimes of every kind; and we have seen many melancholy examples of very highly educated men falling victims to drunkenness and other degrading vices." Daniel Webster therefore truthfully said: "Man is not only an intellectual, but he is also a moral being; and his religious feelings and habits require cultivation. Let the religious element in man's nature be neglected; let him be influenced by no higher motive than low self-interest, and subjected to no stronger restraints than the limits of civil authority, and he becomes the creature of selfish passions and blind fanaticism. The cultivation of the religious sentiment represses licentiousness, incites to general benevolence and the practical acknowledgment of the brotherhood of men; inspires respect for law and order, and gives strength to the whole social fabric; at the same time it conducts the human soul upward to the Author of its being." After quoting these words, Rev. David Dyer, chaplain of the Albany Penitentiary, adds, page 348: "Of all the attributes of man, the moral and religious are the most important and influential. They, by divine arrangement, have this precedency. They are designed to be the mainspring of thought and action, the director of the whole man. Let them be neglected, debased, or treated as of secondary importance, and the whole system will be deranged. Readjustment and reformation will be impossible. There may, indeed, be induced, under the power of seclusion or physical force, a servile fear; perverse passions may, for a time, be checked, and the developments of a depraved will may be staid; but let these appliances be removed, and it will soon become apparent that instead of promoting reformation they have induced spiritual hardness, recklessness, and hate, and made the man a more inveterate slave to his passions and a greater injury to the state. The moral and religious improvement of convicts should, therefore, be the first and constant aim of all to whose care they are committed. Their chief efforts should be directed to the sanctification of the springs of thought and action; and this secured, through the benediction of God, those objects of Christian solicitude will go forth to exemplify in virtuous lives the wisdom and utility of these efforts."